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This article is by Alan Snitow, executive VP, director of integration, at DDB Chicago.

Every February America tunes in to see what the advertising industry has cooked up since last year's Big Game. Consumers vote, agency-types disagree, and pundits seek portents of the future. This year, the coverage was dominated by how “quick-thinking” and “real-time” marketing has become. The conversation shifted from celebrating creativity to celebrating opportunism.

Ironically, when the Oscars rolled around two weeks later, marketers were already debating whether content planned in advance qualified as “real-time marketing”; others went so far as to suggest RTM had already jumped the shark. Either way, reaction time isn’t everything.

There’s another way in which America’s marketers are evolving their playbook that has gotten far less attention. Beyond the speed with which brands are reacting, there’s a story in the changing nature of content itself.

We are witnessing an unprecedented willingness to use others' marketing as a reference point in one’s own communications. And an increasing comfort in not just referencing, but responding to, another’s advertising messages. The era of “brand-on-brand engagement” is now well underway.

It’s not that this sort of thing never happened before. But it’s occurring with increasing frequency and across more categories. Likewise, leveraging borrowed equity from partnerships with aligned marketers is old hat. What we’re experiencing today is more like “stolen equity” where the other brand not only wasn’t asked to participate, they might have their assets used against them.

The simplest version of brands building off another’s communications takes place in social media, particularly Twitter. This sort of repartee can be playful, like Old Spice’s back and forth with Taco Bell, or more chippy, like AMC Theatre’s exchange with Oreo.

Or full-on snarky. A good example was ’s shot at Mercedes Benz over the Superbowl blackout. But the content slinging didn’t stop there, as Nissan then mocked Audi over their Super Bowl spot, making it a three-way: Have confidence to make a move at prom, but rather not get punched in the face? You can Date Better With Sentra.

This phenomenon of brands reacting and responding to other brand’s marketing isn’t limited to Twitter, and it gets higher stakes as more resources and more substantive content gets deployed.

Rival condom brands Help Remedies and Sir Richards recently skirmished publicly. Sir Richard’s sent out a press release and created ecards and assets poking fun at an application Help created for prospective users.

Help in turn created a new Facebook header and a public offer to send the Sir Richard spokesperson to a brothel.

A less friendly effort was the latest shot in the Cola wars. Pepsi created their own video using characters from Coke’s Superbowl work, showing them choosing Pepsi over Coke when the cameras stopped rolling.

By the way, this behavior isn’t limited to digital. BMW took on Audi in an out-of-home play in California (both then continued it online).

So what is driving this increase in brand-on-brand engagements?

From a cultural perspective, we are living in a remix-and-recycle society where behaviors like sampling music and mashing up content are seen not as derivative, but creative. We’ve also become a society accustomed to repartee; it’s a retweet, reply, like, share culture we live in. Engaging with others we know, even if only virtually, has never been more normal. And because social and digital channels are inherently interactive, it would be odd not to engage, respond, and build on content in that sphere. As brands think and act more like individuals, they are increasingly less likely to merely broadcast and more likely to converse, even with fellow brands.

On a practical level, it’s enabled by the internet making everything searchable, viewable, and linkable, so people are more likely to know about reference material and easily able find it if they don’t. Furthermore, many client organizations are structured so that the people managing digital and non-traditional marketing activity may be different than those overseeing above-the-line efforts. Not to mention that many marketers continue to hold different standards for what’s acceptable activation online and offline.

For these reasons and more, it’s a good bet that brand on brand engagement is a marketing technique that’s here to stay.